The Tango Briefing

by Adam Hall

  It worried me also to think that the vultures had died with them, as if something had followed them out of the plane to kill anything that lived.

  I looped the extension lead across one shoulder to stop it fouling and opened the Pentax, setting it for flash and keeping it slung in front of me so that I could operate it with one hand. There was a chance that if anything happened when I went in there I could got a picture of it and if one day someone thought of processing the film they’d see what had finished me off.

  Loman. I’m going into the freight section.

  His voice was more distant now because the 2000CA was standing outside on the sand.

  Understood.

  I sent the torch beam through the gap and swung the door wider by one inch, stopping and listening, the nerves reacting again and the scalp tightening. Kept seeing their faces, and the gaping beaks of the birds. Another inch and stop and listen and take a grip and bloody well think with the brain instead of the plexus.

  But it was difficult because the organism was aware of danger and preparing its defences, draining the blood from the surface to the internal organs, increasing the breathing-rhythm to feed more oxygen to the muscles, dilating the pupils to admit more light and refining the nerves until they reached the state where they could be activated by stimuli below the normal threshold of sensitivity. The brain was being by-passed by the nervous system, the automatic defence mechanism that snatches the hand from a hot object, that snaps the eyes shut as a spark flies, without the aid of the brain.

  Another inch and stop and listen. Nothing. The beam of light shifting in a calculated zig-zag from high to low: the ribbed wall of the fuselage and alloy racks, an emergency hatchet clipped to a bracket alongside an extinguisher.

  A depth of silence I couldn’t remember having experienced ever before; the silence of the desert, of the dead.

  Quiller.

  The sound of his voice explosive.

  Wait. Release the breath.

  Hear you.

  Is there any problem?

  No problem.

  I’d been off the air for more than a minute and he was having to sweat it out, couldn’t see what I was doing, couldn’t hear.

  Swing it another inch and stop and listen.

  Faint metallic clicking.

  Not perfectly regular.

  Quite close and below me.

  It stopped when I held my breath and began again when I breathed. Satisfactory: the Pentax was slung from the neck and the case buckle was intermittently registering my heartbeat when my diaphragm expanded and contracted in breathing.

  Trickle of sweat into the corner of one eye, stinging a little. Shielded from the intense direct sunshine, the skin was releasing through the pores. The heat in here was of a different quality: it oppressed, stifling.

  Another inch and the beam passed over a cylinder standing erect, clamped to the alloy rack, and I shut my eyes before I triggered the flash to minimize the effect on the dark-adaptation process but even so the torch beam looked almost yellow when I opened them again.

  Loman. First picture: a cylinder, compressed-air type, four feet high, clamped vertically.

  Only one?

  So far. There may be others.

  Forebrain thinking was becoming clearer: the psyche had been too dominant, concerning itself with occult responses, indulging in a sick belief in fiends, in spectral fantasy, dwelling on creaturehood rather than inanimation.

  Nothing had moved, even when the flash had gone off. Nothing in here was alive. Logic found no case for a rigged trap of any kind: they wouldn’t have left one themselves and nobody had been here since they’d died.

  I swung the door at right-angles and took two shots.

  General scene: freight compartment. Two frames.

  Thank you.

  They looked like people.

  Some stood in a group, two or three of them leaning one against the other, about a half-dozen had fallen, either to the floor or piled against the end of the rack at varying angles. They looked like people because at the top of each cylinder was a round protective shield fixed over the nozzle, and below it was the neck widening into shoulders. Scotopic vision had been affected by the last use of the flash and I couldn’t see any details.

  Two shots to allow for panorama montage.

  Thank you.

  There are about twenty more cylinders, same size, and the impact broke some of them away from their anchorage. It looks as if they were all stowed vertically between buffers of foam plastic. The nozzles have got protective caps. Three shots, close-up.

  Blinding light and I waited, shutting my eyes and switching off the torch. First theories at random: the crew had known what they were transporting on this trip and they knew it was lethal and perhaps explosive in terms of chemical expansion or in terms of gas compression sensitive to release. Possible risk of fire or gross reactive burning without flame, nitric acid, so forth. But I wouldn’t have thought this kind of hazard would have induced actual terror in reasonable men.

  Slid the switch, the beam less yellow now.

  There were four racks, two on each side, padded with shock-resistant material and fitted with straps and clamps. For some reason the cylinders couldn’t be shipped horizontally or in crates and their stowage precautions had been quite good to have left some of them still in place after the high deceleration loads of the forced landing. Five oblong crates filled the space between the racks, hard against the rear bulkhead, and they had been protected with a matt black liquid material with rapid hardening qualities: Bostik or a thermal sealing product. Two domed canisters were stowed one each side of the compartment with restraint bands and protective jacketing. A red label was common to every crate, cylinder and canister, with the words Flashpoint Zero: the Lloyds designation for dangerous cargo.

  I gave Loman a general picture and began on the individual labels, starting with the containers that were easy to reach without clambering across the disorder.

  Cylinder. Matt grey, three parallel red bands, metal tabs reading: PH/18179/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder same markings, tab reading PH/18180/M-Cat. IX. Next cylinder painted matt green with four yellow bands. Tab: ZRG/635/2 - Cat. XII.

  There were thirteen in one group, three in another, with markings that tied with one of the domed canisters. The crates contained identical material, all tabs the same.

  His voice came faintly from outside.

  Have you a problem?

  What?

  Have you a problem?

  He meant was everything all right and I got annoyed because I’d only taken half a minute’s respite: the heat was coming mainly from overhead and sweating was profuse. The need for concentrating on the labels was inducing nausea, the beam of the torch wavering, sensation of extreme fatigue.

  No problem.

  I’d been in this bloody oven for twenty minutes and I didn’t want him to poke me to see if I was done.

  Matt blue, two white bands. Tab says: OTJ/487/A - Cat. V.

  And somewhere in the background the failure to understand the urgency, he wished to inform me personally that your mission is the key to a critical situation of the highest international proportions, a top echelon director sent in with his signature on a 6-K form and the death-pill in his pocket, a shut-ended crash-priority mission with the final phase now running, and nothing going on to the tape except these hieroglyphs. Cylinders of BCW gas or something newer than that, something more lethal, but surely it didn’t matter anymore how destructive a weapon was or what it was made of within a given hour today or tomorrow the cities of New York and Moscow and Peking could effortlessly be laid waste and the present concern at the conference tables was how to dismantle, piece by piece, the structure of the kill and overkill. I didn’t understand why I was here.

  Matt red with black bands. Tab: YCJ/2829/E. There’s no reference to any category on this one.

  They wanted my report on the cargo of Tango Victor and they were getting it and it wasn’t my concern to ask why.
I was a ferret and this was the rabbit and my teeth were in its neck.

  GF/A-9/Cat. XII. A point is that ‘Cat.’ might stand for ‘catalyst’, not for ‘category’.

  Noted.

  I began work on the cylinders that had broken out of their clamps and were lying askew on the cabin floor. The nearest of them had smashed its protective cap and the brass nozzle had been snapped off at the neck, and this I reported to Loman. The metal tab was edge-on and I had to kneel between two of the other cylinders to read it. The torch beam centred on it and I struck out blindly to force the thing away but it screamed and I hit a shoulder and crashed across the loose sand with the blaze of the sun bursting over me as the wind came howling and threw me whirling over the roaring dunes and I spun dying, drifting and spinning, falling.

  The world burning and the whirl of dunes rising as high as mountains round the dizzying horizon, dwarfing me and dominating, looming over me in darkness while the giant birds came screaming as they gathered for the carrion, red of eye and enraged and swooping on me, scream of the mad Arab in my skull repeating, repeating, mountains in the sky, and great birds darkening the heavens, their long necks stretching and reaching and the first strike of a beak and my hands too feeble, the terror trickling in the blood as the sun burst and I fell again and lay sand-drowned.

  Sharp pain finger, hit again, hideous, the beak hooked, hooking and a talon tugging, horror and their red eyes raging and the foul wind of their wings beating at the air and the sand flying up, pain again and tugging and my living hand for carrion they will not and quicker and snatching at a wing with cunning, pulling and the gross black body closer, I refuse and my fingers stronger, pulling again and now the talons hooking in a frenzy and my red blood running but a killing to be made, the bald head turning on the gristly neck, my hands closing and twisting on the last thin scream from the beak and the others fainter now, their cackling farther away, my legs buckling but up again and I stood with it, a dead weight dangling from the broken neck and I swung it, turning, swinging the heavy scarecrow body in a circle till the dead wings caught the air and flapped open and I let it go, you red-eyed bastards, show you, fall and breath knocked out and lying numbed, the sand bloodied and the night coming waves soundlessly breaking drowning.

  Lightheadedness: the mind hollow as a shell but the few thoughts lucid and of an extreme simplicity, diamond-bright and surrealistic, a return to pre-maturity, A is for Apple, This Little Boy has Killed a Bird.

  Ague, the limbs jerking, I would like to be somewhere warm, I am so cold here, S is for Snow but this is Sand. The big birds had attacked me and tried to eat me but I won.

  The sand reddish, the spots becoming brown in the sun, one finger a curious shape and the white of bone shining, peck-peck yes I remember.

  Remember all right, the memory functioning satisfactorily, somewhere the forebrain trying to seize on facts, desperate to know and to act but blocked, frustrating.

  Tango.

  They were circling, as they had been before. I thought I heard them making sounds like chickens, but the brain was so busy that it wouldn’t let me listen properly to anything. It wanted to know the facts. Obviously psychochemicals but not related to mescaline or lysergic acid, not Sarin or the Soman-Tabun group although there was this jerking of the muscles but no paralysis yet. Vision unimpaired, on the contrary, the vultures had the exaggerated 3-D effect you see in stereoscopes, the outline of their moving wings very sharp against the sky.

  Acetyl cholinesterase, the memory super-clear like the vision, the GF, GE and VX group destroying this substance and thus blocking the nerve signals to prevent resetting, my legs jerking worse than my arms, nothing definite.

  Blackout sensations, possible onset of coma, try to keep cerebration clear and coherent: the gas was heavier than air and the residue had stayed in the fuselage, pooling in the trough of the freight section, and that was why I’d been all right till I’d had to crouch over the fallen cylinders to read the tabs. The initial psycho-shock had made me think of a creature, something that had to be fought off, classic reaction: terror is ancient and animistic, fear of a predator, of being eaten.

  Check time I’d been unconscious between ten and thirteen minutes blackout still threatening, secondary stage of the syndrome in some nerve-target agents is coma: muscular trembling, coma, death. Finger not good, bone exposed, how can I tell extent of blood loss and its contribution to syndrome, other injuries, the thing had pecked at lot, the dunes beginning to float and the dark aeroplane increasing at the rim of the vision-field and I got up because they were drifting lower and I didn’t want that again, couldn’t stand that again, the surrealistic clarity darkening now and things becoming confused and the memory going, what was tango, who was tango, get up and hide, can’t stay out here. The dunes beginning to roar and I was running, falling, running again.

  Tango. Tango.

  Voice faint whose voice get up or they’ll have you, eyes out.

  It was different this time because the terror was less. The maelstrom was whirling round me and the birds grew monstrous, cackling overhead and one of them making a dive at me and going away and trying again, but the coma was blunting the nightmare and there was room for an area of almost rational thought: I was trying to run as far as the group of rocks because if I fell again and couldn’t get up they’d come and squabble over me.

  The rocks grew enormous and I thought I’d reached them but they floated away and I had to run in a curve because the desert was a vortex, circling round me, then one of the birds was suddenly right against my face with its hooked beak screeching and I felt the draught of its wings and caught the acrid farmyard stench of the thing as it came for me red-eyed with the talons spread from the stiffened legs and the screeching didn’t stop but when my hands went into the storm of feathers it beat frantically and there was blue-black plumage in my clenched fingers as it rose out of my reach, my legs trying to buckle but I stopped them because I had to run, go on running, the sky was murderous.

  Rocks loomed again and I tripped and crashed down and slid across loose shale, really here, really home, a dark cloud floating under me, the spread of fabric rumpling into folds as I crawled deeper, deeper into the niche where the lizards lived, where I would live, safe from the cackling sky.

  But they came nearer and I couldn’t move any more, their wings thundering close as they hooked and pecked and I tried to move but they knew I couldn’t, the ether smell and the pain digging, I don’t know, I haven’t met this kind of a thing in Europe, their green gowns and the flutter of their hands, we’ll just hope for luck, I guess, and she said yes, They didn’t screech any more, where are they, where are what, leaning over me, wanting to hear what I was saying.

  ‘It’s very fast-acting.’

  Some of them had gone away and the smell of ether was strong. I hadn’t seen him before. I tried to say Diane.

  ‘Diane.’

  Her head turned to look down at me and she said my God, what is that stuff?

  ‘The brand name is Theratal and I gave him 30mg IM, a bit more than the normal dose. I’ve used it for pulling kids out of trips, though not with a dose that size.’ He was putting some instruments away. ‘This is nothing to do with ergot, you know - he’d be dead by this time.’

  My left hand felt like a boxing-glove and I told them to take the stuff off but he just leaned over me again and lifted my eye-lids in turn, nodding to her.

  ‘Get this stuff off my hand.’

  ‘You feeling okay now?’

  ‘I want to use my hand.’

  ‘You have the other one, don’t you?’

  He looked at her and laughed comfortably, pressing the two brass locks and picking up the bag. She seemed worried by this.

  ‘Are you going now?’

  ‘There isn’t anything else I can do until tomorrow. He just has to rest and I’ll leave instructions with the ward nurse: they have Diazon-3 here and it’s the same thing with a Belgian brand name. He’ll be okay.’

&
nbsp; She went to the door with him and I’d got half the bandage off by the time she came back and tried to stop me. She was wearing a zipped windcheater and her hair was in some kind of bandeau.

  ‘Is it night?’

  She said it was.

  There seemed to be odd periods of blackout between periods of lucidity but they didn’t worry me. I wanted to know things and she could tell me, and the lucid periods lasted longer than the blanks. ‘Is base intact?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chirac pull me out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did Chirac pull me out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was still three cylinders I hadn’t reported on but London must have got enough or they wouldn’t have ordered Loman to pull me out. He’d sent Chirac with a helicopter, the only way: that was why I’d heard their wings thundering.

  ‘Get this off, will you?’

  She said it had to stay like that and I told her to shut up and get it done. I don’t like being one-handed even when there’s nothing particular to do. She fetched one of the nurses who’d been here before. The nurse said the bandage had to stay on and I managed to swing my legs off the bed and sit up, nearly flaked out again and said to Diane listen I mean it and she talked some persuasive French, the m’sieur was feeling very frustrated because of his accident and it would be better to do what he asked, so forth, worked in the end because in any case I was in a rotten mood and they could see I was going to tear the bloody thing off if they didn’t co-operate. But the whole wall kept coming and going and I had to sit still for a minute while it stopped.

  Finger looked a mess. I told them how I wanted things, just a No. 1 dressing on it and the others left free, especially the thumb, lose three fingers and you can still grip things, lose the thumb and all you’ve got left is a hook and a hammer.